Walking round the side of the house, they encountered Mrs Battle picking one of the yougest of her children out of the hen run. Purbright thought she looked hostile and excitable, but Gibbins greeted her familiarly and she waddled ahead of them into the house.
After some small-talk in a dialect that Purbright found difficult to follow but which was obviously zestfully indelicate, Mrs Battle began to give answers to Gibbins’s inquiries into the passage of strangers thereabouts.
Her replies, translated one by one to Purbright by his colleague, were to the effect that a woman answering Joan Carobleat’s description had indeed walked by the house on several occasions. She was a visitor, according to Mrs Battle’s observations from her bedroom window, to the house of Mr Barnaby, the gentleman from London way who had bought the next cottage down the road—the last habitation before Avery Woodside—and who enjoyed such other advantages as a morning help from Polstead, a motorcar, fishing rights in the meadowlands of poor palsied Squire, and the nocturnal companionship of various anonymous but drattedly giggly young women.
Was Mr Barnaby likely to be at home now? She thought it highly probable, for she had seen the headlamp beams of his big motor-car flash across her bedroom ceiling late last night and had heard his garage door roll shut. Since then, no traffic had passed but a van or two. Mr Barnaby’s big motor-car certainly had not emerged again. It made a sinful noise, as though bound for race tracks and hotels, and she would not have missed it, even in her sleep.
Had the morning help called that day, as usual? No, she hadn’t, now that it came to be mentioned, not that she came absolutely every day because her husband sometimes got took extra bad.
What sort of a man to look at was Mr Barnaby? She had never looked, save at his lordly passing awheel when she had got no more than a fleet glance at his face, which was dark, she thought, and whiskered, and proud.
Whiskered? Purbright reminded Gibbins that the man who had bought electric cable from Barr and Cranwell, Ltd., Radio and TV, Ludlow, to which a fragment of yellow adhesive tape had led them earlier that day, had also been described as bearded.
How did Mr Barnaby earn a living and pass his time? She had heard nothing of his employment, but Battle thought (for what his opinion was worth) that their neighbour was like to be a gentleman just out of either Parliament or prison and writing a book about it.
After some further conversation in the steamy gloom of Mrs Battle’s nappie-festooned kitchen, the two policemen took their leave.
When they arrived at Mr Barnaby’s unexpectedly ostentatious gateway, Gibbins asked Purbright: “Do you want to see this character on your own? He’s not one of my parishioners; I might just be in the way.”
“No, you come along in,” said Purbright. “I’m not at all sure what I’m going to say to him, anyway. At least you can fill awkward pauses by asking to see his licence, or soliciting for the Boot and Shoe Fund or something. Damn it, you can’t loiter at gates in this weather.”
They made their way through the dead, tangled garden and Gibbins knocked on the front door. “The back would be more to the point as a rule,” he observed, “but this chap’s a foreigner; he probably hasn’t bothered to nail up the front door yet awhile.”
There was no sound within the cottage. Purbright knocked, again without result.
“You go round and try the back,” suggested Gibbins. “I’ll see if his car is still in the garage. It’s not often old Mother Battle’s espionage is at fault.” He strode off towards the shed.
Purbright knocked with his knuckles on the back door and tried the handle. Then he moved to one of the two flanking windows. Inside was a long, clean kitchen.
A few moments later, Gibbins reappeared. “Wherever he is, he hasn’t taken the car,” he announced. “It’s still in the garage.”
Purbright stared round the garden and ranged the fields on the other side of the bordering hedge. “Curious,” he muttered.
“What is?”
Purbright nodded towards the window. “Take a look at how neat the place is. Yet his woman didn’t come today. He must be an unusually tidy fellow.”
“You’d not say that if you saw the garage. You can hardly move for odds and ends and a great tangle of electric flex and stuff. I’d a job getting the door shut again.”
“Electric flex?” Purbright looked at him sharply.
“Yes, yards and...Oh...”
“Oh, indeed,” said Purbright. “Getting warmer, aren’t we?” He turned again to the window. “I suggest, you know, that ‘having reason to suspect’ and all that, we now take a closer look into things.”
He examined the window frame. “Ah, a precedent. How lucky for the Law.” Where recently made indentations appeared in the paint, he thrust upward a penknife blade and eased away the old-fashioned catch. Then he opened the window, climbed on the kitchen bench and jumped down. The slightly apprehensive Gibbins was admitted through the door.
They began to search, ascending first to an attic compartment that had been converted into the nearest approximation to a bath-room that a pumped water supply allowed.
Of the occupant of the cottage there was no sign. “One thing to be thankful for,” confessed Gibbins, “is that we haven’t found him strung up or simmering in chunks in the copper. That’s what I’m always afraid of in these out-of-the-way places. They’ve a nasty sense of humour in the country.” He mooched back into the kitchen and began peeping cautiously into drawers and cupboards.
A little later, Purbright called from the bedroom. “What do you make of this?” he asked, pointing to a jacket and waistcoat that hung behind the door, and then to an open drawer of the dressing table in which had been folded the matching pair of trousers.
Gibbins moved the trousers aside. Braces were attached to them. Beneath the trousers were some underclothes and a shirt. He looked at the cuffs; the links were there. Studs had not been removed from the collar-band.
“It seems,” said Gibbins, after considering these things, “that Mr Barnaby is abroad with precious little clothing on. People don’t put on clean shirts without changing the studs over. And they don’t have separate braces for every pair of trousers.”
“They don’t lay trousers in drawers, either,” Purbright observed. “Unless,” he added, “they happen to be someone else’s that they’ve decided to tidy away quickly. Can you see any shoes and socks over on that side?”
A pair of slightly muddied brogues was discovered in a corner. Further search revealed socks under one of the pillows. Gibbins held them up. “Inside out—like the shirt and vest. That suggests something.”
“It does, doesn’t it?” Purbright agreed, pleased that Gibbins seemed to have entered so well into the spirit of things, in spite of the case having been, as it were, imported. “The gentleman was either an exceedingly careless dresser—which would be odd in anyone with such a passion for tidying things away—or else somebody took his clothes off for him.”